SOURCE: “Berkeley's Imagination,” in Essays on the Philosophy of George Berkeley, edited by Ernest Sosa, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1987, pp. 85-102.

In the following essay, Tipton considers Berkeley's belief about the human imagination and its role in his philosophy of immaterialism.

In Principles, 22-3, and in a parallel passage in the Dialogues,¹ Berkeley presents an argument that is important in his eyes because he thinks, or appears to think, that it is sufficient to establish his immaterialism. He is, he says, “content to put the whole” upon the issue of whether his reader can “conceive it possible for one extended moveable substance, or in general, for any one idea or any thing like an idea, to exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it.” The reader, or Hylas in the Dialogues, has only to look into his own thoughts to find the answer. To be sure, one can...